Nicolas Sarkozy provokes French left by honouring Albert Camus

French intellectuals have heaped scorn on a proposal by Nicolas Sarkozy to bestow the country’s greatest posthumous honour upon the writer Albert Camus, accusing the rightwing president of trying to cash in on the thinker’s popularity with little respect for his politics or personality.
Sarkozy said in Brussels last week that he thought it would be an “extraordinary symbol” to transfer the Algerian-born author’s remains to the Panthéon, the resting place for heroes of France, on the 50th anniversary of his death in January.
“I thought it would be a particularly pertinent choice,” he told journalists, while cautioning that no decision had yet been taken. “[It is] a project which is extraordinarily close to my heart.” An Élysée adviser, Georges-Marc Benamou, told journalists last month that Camus’s “non-conformism in relation to France’s elites” appealed to the president, the son of a Hungarian immigrant who prides himself on not having come from the conventional politician’s background.
But the idea of a rightwing leader often accused of authoritarian tendencies and anti-intellectualism celebrating the life of a man who made a career out of political resistance and literary endeavour has outraged many Camus experts.
They suspect Sarkozy is using a golden opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of a charismatic hero, whose ideas are being feted by the mainstream half a century after he died in a car crash. (…)
(Hat tip: Keith Hart)
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Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson




